Everyone code-switches
Mixed-race politicians like Kamala Harris and Barack Obama have faced criticism for different behavior with different audiences. But all humans code-switch — even you.
Issue #76
The earliest memory I recall code-switching, I definitely didn’t know I was code-switching.
My brother and I had been friends with the two boys across the street of our old house growing up. They were also two brothers, around the same age as us, part of a friendly white family with a blind Golden Retriever dog. It was classic 1990s American suburbia, riding our bikes carefree in the cul-de-sac, my brother creating BMX jumps from scrap wood, me plastering art across the asphalt with giant pieces of colored chalk.
One evening, my hands probably caked with a rainbow of powder, our mom, who we call “Amma,” a pairing to our dad who we call “Appa,” motioned us in for dinner. As my brother and the neighbor boys were riding their bikes across the slightly steep driveways, I walked over. I think I wanted to say “Amma is calling us in for dinner,” but stumbled through words and said something to the effect of “mom” said it’s dinnertime. That small moment of my brother and I using “mom” in sentences we never had — and never have since — felt so deeply different that I still remember that scene to this day.
For anyone who has had to navigate between worlds — cultural, religious, generational, socioeconomic, professional, academic, and so on so forth — you probably get it. There are those often-subconscious moments when you code-switch in everyday life.
Just as Taro Gomi’s famed children’s book “Everyone Poops” broadcasted the most obvious truth about humanity, I’m here to tell you now: Everyone code-switches. It’s as much a part of the verbal human experience, as laughing or screaming.
Britannica defines code-switching as the “process of shifting from one linguistic code (a language or dialect) to another, depending on the social context or conversational setting.”
Everybody does it.
You might not talk to your boss in the same tone you talk to a 3-year-old. You speak with your partner differently than you do with a random stranger. A phone-call trying to get your canceled airline ticket rebooked is likely a different set of vocabulary than catching up with a relative.
So it’s baffling when people seem surprised when humans code-switch.
The Harvard Business Review recounts a video of former President Barack Obama that went viral. It shows Obama, who is half-Black and half-white, greet two people in the U.S. Men’s Olympic basketball locker room a bit differently.
Now, some folks are shocked when Vice President Kamala Harris, who was mostly raised in East Bay Black communities by an first-generation Indian American mother, code-switches at times on the campaign trail. Is the code-switching pandering, some have asked?
Fox News even went so far to produce a side-by-side comparison of Harris talking in different accents with different audiences, as if it were some novel phenomenon. The network’s Senior White House Correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about Harris’ code-switching during an official White House press briefing — and it was quite an exchange:
Doocy: Since when does the vice president have what sounds like a Southern accent?
Jean-Pierre: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Doocy: Well, she was talking about unions in Detroit using one tone of voice. She used the same line in Pittsburgh, and it sounded like she at least had some kind of a Southern drawl.
Jean-Pierre: Do you hear the question… do you think Americans seriously think that this is an important question?
Jean-Pierre went on to call the question “insane,” and Doocy asked if that’s how Harris talks in meetings at the White House.
There has been a lot of chatter about this topic in last couple weeks, and Columbia linguist John McWhorter explained it all very clearly and succinctly in a recent New York Times opinion piece:
Language is about reaching into another mind. It’s about connecting. Code-switching is one of the ways that humans use language to connect. Using the colloquial dialect of a language serves the same function as drinking or getting a mani-pedi together. It says, “We’re all the same.” It is especially natural, and common, when seeking connection about folksier things or summoning a note of cutting through the nonsense and getting to the heart of things in a “Let’s face it” way. This is why many of us readily say “Ain’t gonna happen” even if we aren’t given to saying “ain’t” regularly. In a global sense, Harris’s code-switching is completely ordinary. Many people from other countries would be perplexed about anyone thinking her code-switching is remarkable, much less offensive.
So now you might notice the next time you code-switch. You might not. Does it matter? It’s all part of the human social experience.
Though I must say there is one code-switch I do that I hope no human ever witnesses: The absurdly high-pitched, baby-talking-gibberish voice that only one’s canine friend should ever hear.
Thanks for joining the conversation,
Vignesh
Code-switching is inherently related to names, too
Some of us even subconsciously — or consciously — code-switch our own name pronunciation.
For the past few months, we’ve been interviewing South Asian Americans about their names for a long-term reporting and archival project about names in our communities, our relationships with them, the meanings, the complex histories and identity.
NEXT WEEK, on Thursday, Sept. 26,
is anchoring a conversation about all-things South Asian names live on Zoom. We’ll have two experts join us: Dr. Amrita Ghosh, assistant professor of South Asian literature at University of Central Florida; and Dr. Shyam Sriram, assistant professor of political science at Canisius UniversityWe hope you can attend. Click this link to RSVP to the Zoom discussion, which is at 8 p.m. Eastern/7 p.m. Central/6 p.m. Mountain/5 p.m. Pacific.
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